Flower Hotel Ulan Bator

... Mongolian teenager was guiding us around and allegedly was stroking Sarahs leg – not good! In the afternoon I managed to persuade Sarah to climb a mountain and she agreed on the condition that she could sing disney songs at the top of her voice – fair deal! That night we had the most amazing starry sky we’d ever seen – you could see the whole strip of milky way through the sky. We also bumped into Tuul who was about to do her twice daily ...

... off course, though, as a day later things were still cold and windy but certainly not life-threatening, as we had been led to expect.


UB may be a soulless, polluted modern sprawl but it was wonderful to be there and to luxuriate under a hot shower and sleep under a duvet in a heated room... and then there was the veggie meal... oooooh! And UB is where i am now, typing this in the very same veggie restaurant. We made it up to ...

· Nairamdal was built in 1978 starting with summer camp, and finished in 1981 with winter camp. The Russian wife of the Mongolian president built it. It is the most popular summer camp in all of Mongolia, which I can understand after seeing the summer camp in the Gobi.

· It is extremely frowned upon for a Mongolian to date a foreigner. Not all nationalities are bad, such as Korean can be acceptable, but the idea is that since they still live in ...

Mongolia.

Without a doubt the highlight of the trip!

After Ugily, we headed on to the next city of Khovd. The roads were nonexistent. We drive on tracks most of the time, think the worst west of ireland roads on steroids with rocks ready to smash your exhaust. It was a good 400km to khovd, so we started at 5am and went until 7pm in the evening. Probably the most fun iv ever had in a car. Driftin on gravel roads at 60km/hr on the ...

... we dutifully
complied. Sadly, we had to stay in a tent rather the ger, and more
sadly, the tent seemed to have come as a freebie with a magazine and
was designed to keep the sun off tourists on the beach, not to
shelter trekkers in the wilderness of northern Mongolia. The large
numbers of rips and tears in the fabric provided excellent
ventilation, but it wasn't long before the tent was full of flies and
mosquitoes like a cloud of smoke swirling ...

... the day getting dinner, drinks, bungee bouncing on a trampoline, and going to see Transformers 2 with Mongolian subtitles . Uya feel asleep, I would have if it had been any other movie.

There are now four more sessions left, of course these four will go much faster than the first. The current session is 7 days, followed by another 10 day, and two more 7 days. This session is more international than before, and is already showing some difficulties.

... 12am though. Everyone was practically dead tired by then cause all of us has been up since 7am that morning.

We left the club to find it was pouring rain. Not ready to home yet, we crossed to street to get some Mongolian food. We hung out in the restaurant, had a meal and of course drank tea before we all caught a taxi back to where we were staying for the night. Oh and I forgot to mention something about the taxis ...

Well, I made it to Ulan Bator!!!!! Mongolia is beautiful, UB not so much. It's like a sketchy, run down Communist town. Sorry if there are typos; I'm sitting in an internet cafe with my sunglasses on because I forgot my regular glasses in the hostel and I can't see without them. The keyboard is dark, so i can't read the keys with sunglasses on.

Anyways, where to start? I arrived in plenty of time for the train from Beijing, and ...

... the art of Squatting at this stage. So Sunday afternoon came like a Christmas present when we arrived at the Hot Springs, normal toilet and hot showers straight from the springs... After quick showers it was straight into the hot spring pools and baths where we sat for hours with beers and even had our dinner there. We only left cos it got dark and we couldn't find our way back to our Ger....lol.... The next morning it was more of the same and back into the pools to relax in the sun ...

... is Buddhist, with Christian and Muslim minorities, and traditional shamanism in the countryside is still going strong. At the monastery, I felt as though I’d stepped into a film about Tibet. Mongolian Buddhism is very similar to Tibetan Buddhism, and the monks all use the Tibetan language to pray and chant. Rows of large prayer wheels spin gently, and symbolically colored scarves are tied to nearby trees. In one building is an enormous statue of the Goddess of Compassion ...